The Golem

The Golem’s brain was of leather, all balled up and stuffed inside that big, round skull of his. Music had run along his stereo wire nervous system since before consciousness had taken hold and deodorant sprayed from his great concertina lung. The women he was sworn to protect tossed bright silken scarves over him until he was a giant man of rags which shone in the sun, blue and orange and green.

When the great cattleships came, covering the ocean, the Golem was there to meet them. The crews of cheesekeepers, tekno-yogis and grass dragons ridiculed him out there on the beach, his oneness and the very look of him.

The man of rags stood his ground.

They lobbed sunmakers in his direction until the nuclear fires incinerated his costume and melted the wetplaz flesh beneath. Their dream-scribbling programs brought into existence frenetic insects made of pure thought. These tore at his smoking bones of living granite until geysers of molten marrow sprayed from the cracks. The bugs steamed up to the sky in scattering wisps of ideas.

The golem’s teetering skeleton collapsed. His skull shattered against a rock and the rising tide gobbled up his unfurling leather brain. The ships came closer to the shore but found themselves called back again. Something in the seafoam sang to their bovine blood, some cousin from the days before the chaos clouds escaped their laboratories and shuffled the genes of everything they touched.

“Meet me on the ocean floor and we’ll graze on untainted seaweed for the rest of our days,” the voice called. The ships went, oblivious to the struggles and the screaming of their tiny crews. The Golem’s spirit went down to sleep in peace.

Ω

Matthew Sanborn Smith bleeds ketchup and often wakes up in the hospital after big family barbecues. His work has been seen or heard at Chizine, Albedo One, Challenging Destiny, Antipodean SF, Thaumatrope and StarShipSofa. He sang on the "We Are the World" follow-up single, "We are the Moon Too. We Forgot to Mention that Last Time."